We are trying to ensure all our products are great in every market: Facebook CPO Chris Cox

There are 138 million active Facebook users in India. When we look at the next one billion internet users, one-third of them will come from India.Shelley Singh | ET Bureau | Updated: January 13, 2016, 10:17 IST

Chris Cox, chief product officer, Facebook leads the social networking giants product management, design and marketing functions globally. One of the earlier employees of the 12 year-old Facebook, Cox, 33, joined in 2005 and helped build the initial versions of key Facebook features including News Feed. Cox reports to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and this is the first time he is starting the New Year with a visit to India, where it has 138 million of the 1.5 billion users globally.

“One-third of the next one billion Internet users in the world will come from India. It is an imperative for us to do a really good job of paying attention to the needs of Indian users,” says Cox in an interview with Shelley Singh.

However, Cox while maintaining that to grow in India and make the platform relevant to users in India is a key mission for Facebook, declined to elaborate on Free Basics, a much criticized tool to achieve that goal.Edited excerpts:

What’s the purpose of your India visit?

This is my first business trip of the New Year. For me the huge personal priority is helping everybody at Facebook to do a better job of building products for India. There are 138 million users active Facebook in India. When we look at the next one billion internet users, one-third of them will come from India. So it is an imperative for us to do a really good job of paying attention to the needs of Indian users.

It falls into a few buckets, one is just technical product itself and India has a lot of people using 2G networks, so we spent a lot of time over the past year in improving performance of Facebook for Android and lower end networks like 2G networks and we are doing a lot of work to both features specifically to make Facebook work better if the connection is intermittent.

We are rolling out a news feed that makes it easier for you to get fresh content even if the connection is intermittent. All of this is coming out of spending lot of our time and energy, getting our product managers, engineers and researchers into India doing a better job of measuring and understanding how good a job we are doing in India.

For me personally there is no more important signal I can send than to be here to start the year.

Even three years back Facebook had sent a team to India to study the market - the networks and connectivity challenges. What’s the big issue that you grapple with in this space?

2G specifically is just hard. Every week on Tuesdays many of my engineers use 2G connection. We created this as lot of our developers are in places where there is very good network and the best way to improve the product and make it work better in poor connectivity is to give the developers that experience.

And so rather than just saying every once in a while you should go and use Facebook on 2G we present lot of our teams a switch over to Android phones. And on Tuesdays they get a prompt to switch over to 2G. Everyone will use 2G for a day. That will let them see in all the nooks and crannies.

You mentioned one third of the next billion Internet users will come from India. India is not a huge advertising market compared to many other countries. What’s your strategy and priority here?

The mission of the company comes back to connecting everybody in the world. We view India as incredibly important because there are so many people already who are using Facebook to do lots of different things. The number of users of groups in India doubled last year. That’s a really big deal.

We see growth in engagement of Indian users is something where we have an opportunity to do the job of making the product amazing. That’s what we are focused on.

You have been with Facebook since 2005 and have seen Facebook grow, working across multiple divisions - NewsFeed, HR, products. What next? What’s the big challenge you grapple with?

The reason I am here today to begin my new year is our ability to serve the next one billion people to come on the Internet. Mark (Zuckerberg) thinks, our whole product team thinks it is huge opportunity for us to do something of value and of significance in the world.

Getting that right is harder than what we have done in the last 10 years because the conditions are so much more varied. There are so many kinds of phones out there, so many different networks connections, hundreds of languages. And yet if we can get all those right something magic happens. Our focus is really on getting that next billion people an amazing experience.

Apart from network connections, low end phones, cost of data is an issue. There are very few people in India who can buy the more expensive smartphones or use expensive data plans. How do you tackle that?

The first is to make sure that we have experience that work well on every class of device. FB Lite (launched in June 2015) is an example of that. It’s incredibly successful. It is designed specifically for devices that may have been launched in 2007 or 2008 or 2009. It also means making sure that 'Facebook for Android’ works really well on devices that were made years ago.

In the next five years or so feature phones will be an extinct creature or at least a very rare creature. Whereas poor networking conditions are here to stay. So what’s interesting just from a pure, macro, long term, technology landscape is that networks are a more entrenched issue if you try to build something for everyone in the world.

We have this system that works like an air traffic control - imagine a room with every single phone in the world plugged into a system that is running, downloading, every single feature on Facebook over and over again to identify oh, it looks like a 2009 Samsung device etc. Those are the kind of things we are getting better at doing to make sure that we get the most relevant experience for users.

One of the programs that you have to reach out to this diversity of people is Internet.org now called Free Basics. That’s facing lot of criticism. Why do you think so? Are there alternatives to Free Basics you are looking at, as it’s not acceptable to many people?

We have a lot of people here on the ground today to talk about Free Basics and they do a better job of understanding how to make the program something that everybody can feel good about. We have already made a tonne of improvement to the program based on the feedback we have got. We are committed to making Free Basics work as there are lot of people out there who don’t have access to the Internet.

But how do you answer criticism to Free Basics. It’s against net neutrality, that it’s against the basic tenets of open internet, open to anyone. People should be free to decide what to access?

Our stance on this is that net neutrality is a good thing and helps us works towards models that help get people on to the Internet for the first time.

You are not against net neutrality. How do you define net neutrality?

Today, I want to focus on just Facebook.

Facebook started as a directory and now enables messaging to news and also enabling business. What's Facebook's larger goal? Is Facebook the internet?

We see Facebook as part of Internet. Use of Facebook is sending people to lot of new directions. For me today it was bunch of friends posting on David Bowie a legendary figure for so many people. I read commentary on him from all over the Internet, that I may never have visited if it weren’t for Facebook.

I view that as incredibly important and true to what Facebook is. I view Facebook as existing in a very complimentary way with every piece of content out there.

People see a hidden agenda in Facebook bringing more people online to a select few sites rather than the whole internet…

I have to say I am not here on this trip to talk about Free Basics. To talk about everything else we are doing and that’s lot of other things. We have been surprised by how much resistance we have encountered and we have tried to be really open in communicating and responding to every piece of feedback we have got and we will continue to do that.

Lot of people may not be on Facebook, but on WhatsApp or other platforms. How do you convert that user base. What’s the value proposition you offer them?

Messaging is a very small, high frequency activity for audience to communicate with. This is a very different use case than what you are doing when you use Facebook or Instagram which is communication with very broad audience.

If you scroll through news feed today, you are learning about hundreds of people. If you scroll through WhatsApp you are learning about smaller number of people but in a much deeper way. We are trying to ensure all our products are great in every single market and once they mature we see that they co-exist quite nicely.

Lot of people in India earn between of $2 to $5 per day. Getting a phone itself is a big deal. How meaningful will it be for them to be on Facebook?

One example is use of groups for commerce. In Indonesia and Mauritius, we see massive number of people in these countries using Facebook as a tool. 25% of Mauritius is in a single group, which is for buying and selling things. If we make it easier for you to transact, a small business owner transact, like some groups are for auto parts some are for kids clothes. These simple connects help people get what they need.

We are convinced that improving the experience for next billion internet users is going to have all kinds of value beyond even what I can explain today.

Among the first time Internet users have you seen kind of behavior pattern in terms of what they go for first - WhatsApp, FB?

FB, WhatsApp and Instagram are all very popular. The first thing that any product person cares about is does this deliver something meaningful and we know that all three of those have it.

The thing we need to do is to make sure that we don’t get in the way. If the network in not great, if the translation is not great but the behavior patter is very common you joined FB as you heard from a friend. If we are able to help you do that quickly, to enable people to have that magic moment where ever they are.

What are some of the key improvements that Facebook has built in from the Tuesday effort?

Facebook Lite is one (started in June 2015). A-sync feed is another. If your connection is poor it allows you to get more feed stories that are stored on the device rather than going on network.

Commenting offline is another example. If your connection is intermittent and you are writing a comment it can be frustrating to post. There are hundreds of such details that we are finding in all the nooks and crannies of spaces where when your network goes down you can still interact. You will see more and more of this.

How many engineers are involved?

Hundreds of them. The idea is to create lot more immediate empathy in the hands of the engineers and developers who are working on the Facebook experience. That’s one example of the kind of things that we do to change the culture.

We have also tried to get more and more research teams in India on the ground in the cities and villages to understand what exactly, what little details could be better. We are working right now on an experience which helps people understand the privacy of their profile pictures.

We just learnt from some research trips in India that this was a specific issue of concern especially among women and until we got the translation exactly right we were just not doing a good job of addressing that issue. That’s something that gets on the roadmap that comes out of doing a better job of researching what people’s needs are here and getting them into a products roadmap right away.

Where do you see social media in next five years, 10 years?

From last 10 years experience I can tell people are going to find great value. There will be adoption in use of messaging. Mobile is the underpinning, most important technology trend of our time. On top of that we see video as very important tool for people to share.

10 years ago it was mostly using a keyboard and a computer users typed text, and today it is a much more immersive experience. We view it rather than just look at it like a page, it’s more like a portal - phone becomes a portal.

When you see us roll out things like 360 degree video it won’t be relevant for everybody next year, but if we look far enough those are the kind of things that will help us get close to seeing the world through each other’s eyes. Hopefully for every single person in India in the next five years we will be able to offer fast, reliable and super high quality Facebook experience.